Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh speaks to a young man on Detroit 's east side two months after the Detroit riot in July 1967. The young man tells the mayor the rubble had been a store.
Ira Rosenberg/Detroit Free Press

Twelfth Street is pictured under a cloud of smoke during the rioting in 1967.Errant flames of the 1967 riot swept into residential sections destroying solid homes of longtime residents. Among them was the family of Barata Bey, whose Euclid Avenue home was totally destroyed.
Tony Spina/Detroit Free Press

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William Charron, 71 of Bloomfield Hills talks with (L to R) Bree Boettner and Hannah Sabal with the Detroit Historical Museum inside a conference room at the museum in Detroit on Saturday, June 18, 2016. Sabal and Boettner are two of several people collecting audio stories of people that have stories to tell about being in Detroit in 1967 and the riots that happened that summer.(Photo: Eric Seals)

The late 1960s came back to life in third-floor conference rooms at the Detroit Historical Museum on Saturday as stories were spun into audio recorders

William Charron, 71, of Bloomfield Hills was among a steady stream of visitors who came to tell how the Detroit riot in July 1967 affected them for a new collection called "Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward."

"I felt the riot was intensely personal to me and my wife," he told the Free Press after telling his story. "We got married during the riot. My wife's family owned businesses in Detroit. The riot changed everything.

"I read about the project in the Free Press and wanted to add my story to the collection."

That's exactly what organizers were hoping for as they launched the project — a chance to see the riot through a bunch of individuals' lives.

Rioting began when Detroit’s nearly all-white police force in July 1967 arrested scores of black revelers at an after-hours drinking club on 12th Street — since renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard — triggering the city’s most devastating period of violence, which ended only after Gov. George Romney ordered the Michigan Army National Guard into the city, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions.

Already, the museum has gathered dozens of oral histories from local luminaries — including former Detroit Deputy Mayor Isaiah (Ike) McKinnon, New Detroit founding Chairman Joseph L. Hudson Jr., and federal judge Damon Keith — "but now we’re looking to interview other individuals from the region who had significant firsthand experiences,” said Sarah Murphy, spokeswoman for the nonprofit Detroit Historical Society, which operates the museum.

Future collection days are scheduled for July 23 and Aug. 20. Ultimately, Murphy said, the Detroit 67 project aims to schedule collection days at other sites, including the Grosse Pointe War Memorial in Grosse Pointe Farms, Focus: HOPE, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and Temple Beth-El in Bloomfield Township.

The goal? “To bring together diverse voices and communities around the effects of this historic crisis to find their place in the present and inspire the future,” according to www.detroit1967.org and the project’s news release.

Countless metro Detroiters who lived through the period lost homes, businesses or loved ones to the looting, arson and gunfire that claimed 43 lives.

Those who would like to record their oral histories of the period can register by calling the Detroit Historical Museum at 313-833-7912; or send an e-mail to detroit1967@detroithistorical.org